You do Nature a great service when you take a few pine cones up higher and help the trees reach the top. If you cannot reach the top yourself, then go as far as you can and throw them as far up as you can, and soon enough, from the tree's point of view, the whole thing will be covered with trees. Like fur. Those tips are bald spots and they're bugging the piss out of the trees.

Actually, when you do climb up there, not even necessarily at tree line but throughout the whole range up there where configurations create mini climate situations like continuous wind channeled up a hill, you will find among the crags small pine trees taking hold, the roots dig into the rock and wend throughout the rock and the tree produces a small tortured tree bent miserably into undignified shapes and offering themselves as sort of handles to rock climbers who cannot help but think, "Jesus Christ, this is a perfect bonsai tree I'm grabbin' " and then another and another. And they're thinking $$$$ thousands at least, money just sitting there. And by 'they' I mean 'me.' And they think about coming back equipped to remove them and of course that would be quite impossible but it does show right there how the whole bonsai idea came about.

"Wouldn't that mountain look a lot better with an oil rig on top of it?"

Oil shale must be mined not drilled. And it isn't going to get mined out of a national park. Especially one that doesn't have any. The Green River formation is in Western Colorado, southwestern Wyoming, and eastern Utah.

I was at that exact spot in 1963 at the age of 6, getting the lecture from my parents that water falling on one side made it to the gulf of Mexico, the other to the Pacific Ocean. My memory of that scene is as vivid as the photo in the blog. The family photo from 1963, shot on Kodachrome, has increased in density over the decades and is a tad dark.

Chip mentions tree roots in rocks. Daughter and I drove the Rockies last spring, joking all trees should be destroyed to accommodate greenies because their roots frack rock, causing surface and sub-surface commotion, dangerous to nature. Also stop waters, they erode nature, cause earthquakes. And winds, same reason. Thus we amused ourselves for hours while also developing novel-length narratives re things or people moved by.

Jimbino, if you want to see segregation, just visit some of the public parks in Los Angeles. Often there isn't a white face in the place, and considering who is paying for them, that just don't seem right. I say call the national guard, and force some diversity on them folks.

This picture is a good illustration of the environmental damage created by mountains..

As you can clearly see in those pictures, at certain elevations the mountain starves the trees of water moisture.. making it impossible for trees to grow.. the desolation creates an elevated, deserted, treeless eyesore... Who wants to see a treeless landscape?

There's a cave here, Sandia Man Cave, and the kids and I went to see it. Caves are in the ground, right? It was up on the side of a cliff. (Silly Indians... mining ocher instead of looking at butterflies!)

What there isn't up on top of the mountain are the geological structures that trap oil or gas. If the sediment layers (you can see the lines) included those sorts of organic deposits in shale or whatever, it would have all seeped out the exposed sides.

PP wrote: Hemp would look, well...natural there. And yes, it could fuel the country.

Hemp grown on that mountainside would be a slippery slope situation. Of course it would have to be harvested by machines unless you're a real hairy shirt type guy. Also, I'm not convinced that hemp is a biomass panacea for many climates.

OTOH, I have repeatedly argued that Madison should pioneer the harvesting and drying of lake weed for power generation.

Hagar, yes. It's limestone along the top of the Sandias. There's sandstone on top of that same limestone strata where I live. There's granite directly below the limestone and a billion year unconformity between them.

There's coal mining (or was) not 20 miles north of here.

So could there be "oil" on top of a mountain? Sure there could be.

As I understand it, though, it wouldn't *stay* there. Oil gets trapped when the sedimentary layers, (which are always laid down horizontally) rift or buckle to make areas that collect oil and natural gas. (Look at the glacier picture below and it shows awesome curves and folds in the rock layers.) There has to be porous rock beneath non-porous rock so that the oil and gas can move, but not escape.

Fracking, as I understand it (barely) involves making insufficiently porous rock more porous by fracturing it which allows the gas and oil to move. It still has to be under a non-porous layer or fold, I think.

So up there on the mountain top, even if it's got the right sorts of rocks and they formed in the right environment and during the best pre-historic time... the porous rock layers are exposed. Movable things like oil or natural gas... move.

A writer friend of ours was at a party at the house of someone who was, at that time, a star. When the partying died down a bit, this star took the leftover partgoers on a tour of his/her large home pot farm.

That white streak along the top of the Sandias is limestone, laid down when this area was under water (and yes, that was salt water, the ocean).

Try to imagine the incredible time span and the geological, climatological changes that occurred to bring us to where ocean sediments are now thousands of feet above sea level. The changes, the groaning of the continental plates.

Think of the daisy chain of animals, plants, bacteria that have come and gone in the eons that it has taken to bring the bottom of the ocean to the heights of the mountains.

NOW....think about those morons in the green peace, eco nazis who worry about the possible life ending, world shattering loss of a freaking butterfly, snail darter or crayfish. They want to preserve the environment in amber. NOTHING should ever change. No species evah!! should be damaged, compromised or go extinct. They want the world to stop to prevent the change that is inevitable.

Think of the millions and billions of species and variations of species that HAVE gone extinct since those layers of deceased invertebrate sea creatures, died and deposited their carcases at the bottom of an extinct ocean to create those limestone layers thousands of miles above the extinct ocean.

Think about how each species, including ourselves, is a survivor built on the backs of previous generations of successful animals or plants. Each one adapting to changing conditions to become stronger and better.

It makes it very difficult to take the whining,flagilating and hair pulling angst about some butterfly today, or a spotted owl seriously.

DBQ wrote: Try to imagine the incredible time span and the geological, climatological changes that occurred to bring us to where ocean sediments are now thousands of feet above sea level. The changes, the groaning of the continental plates.

"Fracking, as I understand it (barely) involves making insufficiently porous rock more porous by fracturing it which allows the gas and oil to move. It still has to be under a non-porous layer or fold, I think."

Yes. And the fracking fluid is so non-toxic that it can be poured on crop fields and crops be grown thereon without deleterious effect on anyone in the food chain. Yet EPA says it has to be "contained." So it is, adding cost at the pump and meter.

The US oil and gas industry, not Silicon Valley, is the driver of US technological prowess.

I suppose that the summit of a mountain could be volcanic and I'll admit I always thought that it was weird and amazing that a sea bed would be on top of a mountain, but it's actually more weird an amazing if the top of the mountain is granite. Sediment and sea-floor are at least formed on the surface. Granite is only formed deep *deep* below the surface.

So it's probably weirder and more amazing that there is granite right under the limestone up on top of the mountain.

The Continental Divide mountains in the picture seem pretty clearly sedimentary, top to bottom, or at least top to tree-line.

The Himalayan mountains are, I believe, also sea floor at the top, or at least continental margin and accretionary wedge material, so wet and salty for sure.

This is why I keep a low profile and comment anonymously. I'm not a professor, just a course instructor by night. My experience with faculty is just so spot-on with these study findings, it's scary. If you read the article, one prog prof says it's because they want objective profs writing objective papers, not biased ones. Oh, the rich gooey irony is too sweet for me to take this morning.